Focus On: JEDDA-DAISY CULLEY | 'DON'T FUCK THE COWBOY 02', 2021

The laws of attraction can prove to be fatal. If a cowboy says he’s a cowboy, how can you be sure? Just because he’s wearing cowboy boots doesn’t make it true. Similarly, the people in uniform we look to and rely on for protection can deceive us. In her recent series of Cowboy paintings, Jedda-Daisy Culley explores her desire to be seen and simultaneously unseen. Drawing parallels between her uncomfortable relationship with intimacy and her desire to have her paintings viewed by others, Culley explores the Latin phrase Amor fati, ‘love of fate’, which Friedrich Nietzsche called ‘eternal recurrence’, alluding to her fatalistic relationship with misconception through painterly disguises and traces.

'Don't fuck the cowboy 02', 2021 is an extension of this complex narrative. Unbridled horse hair brushstrokes depict a central figure from the shoulders up; not unlike a mugshot. His eyes wide and mouth ajar, perhaps caught of guard or thinking of what to say next. The painting is flat yet textural, with a colour palette evocative of Vincent van Gogh's pastoral scenes, where deep blue skies give way to swirling landscapes. 

Through the universal and alluring character of the lone cowboy, the artist nods to themes of independence, self-reliance and deep reverence for the natural world. Traversing the wild west in symbiosis with their surroundings, cowboys forge a mutual connection with their environment, rather than the people who occupy it. In her previous bodies of work, Culley has long considered the landscape as a feminine vessel of creation that melds with the earth and cosmos. Indirectly assuming the role of the cowboy, through her self-reflexive paintings Culley illuminates a correlation between the female experience and a universal masculine archetype, suggesting perhaps that courage and perseverance rely on instinct rather than gendered stereotypes and their misleading facades, that may be disguised beneath the tipped brim of a cowboy hat.